November 28, 2017

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Samsung purchases AI company to hopefully make Bixby better

by John_A

The company’s name is Fluently, and it’s been dabbling with AI tech since 2015.

Samsung’s been aggressively pushing its Bixby virtual assistant since the announcement of the Galaxy S8 at the beginning of the year, and while Bixby has made sizable progress over the past few months, it’s still far from perfect. In an attempt to hopefully progress its AI even further, Samsung recently confirmed that it has purchased a startup by the name of Fluently.

Fluently is small setup with only about 10 employees, and it’s officially the first Korean AI startup that Samsung has ever purchased. Fluently launched the smartphone app “AI-based Recommendation Service” in 2015, allowing users to interact with artificial intelligence that kicked out responses using machine learning.

AI-based Recommendation Service can suggest restaurant menus and offer to adjust your schedule when asking about lunch for the day along with other assistant-like commands, and it supports messaging services like Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Line, and others (think Google Assistant integration with Allo).

Bixby’s strong suits currently lie with performing local actions on your phone and within certain apps, but there’s still a struggle when it comes to contextual conversations. This is something that will hopefully be improved with the acquisition of Fluently, but it remains to be seen how quickly the impact of this purchase will be noticed by consumers.